SciDB was born out of the Extremely Large Databases Workshop (XLDB). The workshop was intended to bring together people from industry, the scientific community, and academia and address issues pertaining to extremely large databases. The SciDB name was first mentioned 2008 in the final report of the 2nd XLDB Workshop (DOI). The project was lead by Michael Stonebraker. The project included faculty members from a number of universities, including MIT, Brown University, and the University of Washington. From the beginning, they decided that SciDB should be open-source and that a start-up should be behind the project. In 2011, Michael Stonebraker and Marilyn Matz co-founded Paradigm4.

For the initial years, the SciDB project homepage was http://www.scidb.org/. This was later replaced with the Paradigm4 homepage. The old website had a page dedicated to The History of SciDB which you can view on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

The academic groups collaborating on SciDB, each have their own local page on the project. Some are briefer while others are more extensive. Most of these academic groups are probably wrapping up their work on SciDB so the pages listed below are a bit stale:

  • SciDB at MIT, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: This page is very brief with very little information.
  • SciDB at Brown University, Data Management Research Group: This page has a sizable list of publications related to SciDB.
  • SciDB at the University of Washington, Computer Science and Engineering Department: The Projects tab gives brief descriptions of various projects tackled by this group in the context of SciDB.

Currently, SciDB is developed exclusively by Paradigm4. They release SciDB as open-source under the Affero GPLv3 license. New versions are released a few times a year. In 2015, for example, there were two versions released. The SciDB version number encodes the year and the month of the release planned date. The latest release is 15.12 which was planned for December 2015. The actual release was in April 2016. For interested customers, Paradigm4 provides enterprise extensions and support. Paradigm4 also maintains a discussion forum where users can get help from other users or SciDB developers. Releases are announced on the discussion forum. Moreover, Paradigm4 maintains a page on GitHub with various examples, plugins, and extensions. Public contributions to the GitHub repositories are accepted by Paradigm4.

Below is a selection of articles and publications about SciDB in chronological order:

  • 2008 Jacek Becla, Kian-Tat Lim: Report from the SciDB Workshop. Data Science Journal 7: 88–95 (2008) DOI
  • 2009 Michael Stonebraker, Jacek Becla, David J. DeWitt, Kian-Tat Lim, David Maier, Oliver Ratzesberger, Stanley B. Zdonik: Requirements for Science Data Bases and SciDB. CIDR 2009 PDF
  • 2010 Gavin Clarke: SciDB: Relational daddy answers Google, Hadoop, NoSQL, The Register (2010) HTML
  • 2010 Paul G. Brown: Overview of sciDB: large scale array storage, processing and analysis. SIGMOD Conference 2010: 963-968 DOI
  • 2011 Michael Stonebraker, Paul Brown, Alex Poliakov, Suchi Raman: The Architecture of SciDB. SSDBM 2011: 1-16 DOI
  • 2013 Michael Stonebraker, Paul Brown, Donghui Zhang, Jacek Becla: SciDB: A Database Management System for Applications with Complex Analytics. Computing in Science and Engineering 15(3): 54-62 (2013) DOI
  • 2014 Peter Cohan: Paradigm4: The Next Big Thing In Big Data, Forbes (2014) HTML